Shirley Jean Nystrom (1934 – 2002)

My Aunt Shirley was what you would call a character. She smoked cigarillos, drank “sudsies” and wore clogs. When she laughed, which was pretty much constantly, her shoulders would heave up and down.

By all accounts she was a tomboy. Growing up we had a brass spittoon in our house that had belonged to my grandparents. In the side was a huge bulge from where some punk kid had thrown a cherry bomb. All my life I thought it was one of my uncles who had tried to blow up the spittoon. When my parents died and I was cleaning out their house, I gave the spittoon to my Uncle Robert, who set me straight. Aunt Shirley was the hooligan who had tossed the cherry bomb inside. Of course.

Shirley, the cherry-bomb thrower.

In our family it was a rite of passage when you turned twelve to be put on a bus by your parents in Omaha to be shipped off to Minneapolis to spend a week with Aunt Shirley. Alone. I’ll let you think about that for a minute. They put you on a bus, possibly with siblings or other cousins, but otherwise alone, without any adult supervision.

I don’t know how or when this tradition started but it was made possible by the fact that Aunt Shirley worked from home selling insurance. If you were a girl, one of the things she did with you during that week was take you to an antique store to look at Depression glass. She would have you pick out your favorite pattern and then every birthday and Christmas for the rest of your life you would receive a piece of Depression glass from Aunt Shirley. I have an entire kitchen cabinet full of bubble glass, the pattern I picked out on that trip to the antique store. I have no idea what she did with the boys. What did they get for Christmas? I’ll have to ask my male cousins sometime.

Every Christmas Aunt Shirley would take the bus down to Omaha from Minneapolis. Always by bus. One time she was supposed to fly somewhere but she missed her flight and the plane ended up crashing. I want to say, “killing everyone on board” because that sounds more dramatic but I really don’t know. At any rate, she never flew again.

She liked to joke that the first thing my grandpa always said when she walked in the door was, “when are you leaving?” Aunt Shirley would spend days cleaning my grandparents’ house from top to bottom and then on Christmas Eve we would all gather in their tiny home, our eyes watering and coughing from all the adults’ cigarette smoke.

Aunt Shirley was the glue that held the family together. When she died we attempted to re-create Christmas Eve a couple of times without her by gathering in my Uncle Jack’s smokey living room, but it was never the same. We stopped trying.

Following are photos of a young Shirley. I’m tired of touching up old, moldy, scratchy photos so I’ll leave pictures of a more mature Shirley for another blog post.

The back simply says, “Shirley” though it looks more like Betty to me.Violet, Betty and Shirley. The back says that the picture was taken in Oakland, Nebraska. I’d love to know who that creepy guy in the background is.Violet and Shirley. The backdrop seems to be the same one that all the boys were standing in front of at Lindy’s funeral. Looks about right — she would have been six when her brother Lindy died at the age of nine. She often mentioned to me what a nice name “Lindy” was and didn’t I think so too? I think she was hoping one of her many nieces or nephews would someday have a son and name him Lindy. If I’d had a boy instead of girls, I certainly would have considered it. I do think it’s a nice name, Aunt Shirley.Shirley in the lower left corner.

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“On July 11, 1961, United Airlines Flight 859 veered off the runway and collided with construction equipment at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado after a flight from Omaha. 17 aboard the aircraft were killed, as was one person on the ground.”

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About

Kim and John became interested in genealogy when their youngest daughter asked, "Are we related to any women pirates?" Though her fascination with female marauders quickly waned, we continue to find our family research endlessly compelling.

Our aim with this site is to share our photos because, as family, they belong to all of you as well. We hope too that it encourages all the Moneys, Nystroms, Calhouns, Connellys, and Carlsons to share what they have. It would be wonderful to have a central repository for all the family photos before they are lost to time.